What Can You Do Today to be Remembered for the Next 100,000 Years?

I’ve recently began writing on Quora (and yes, that’s just one of the reasons I haven’t been posting here as much as I should). One of the recent questions I’ve been asked to answer has been about the far-far-away future. Specifically –

“What can you do today to be remembered 10,000 or 100,000 years from now?”

This is a tough one, but I think I’ve got the solution you’re looking for. Before I hand it over to you, let’s see why the most intuitive idea – that of leaving a time capsule buried somewhere in the ground – is also probably the wrong way to solve this puzzle.

A time capsule is a box you can bury in the ground and will keep your writings in pristine conditions right up to the moment it will be opened by your son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s (repeat a few thousand times) son. Let’s call him… Multison.

So, what will you leave in the time capsule for dear multison? Your personal diary? Newspaper clippings about you? If that’s the case, then you should know that even the best preserved books and scrolls will decay to dust within a few thousand years, unless you keep them in vacuum conditions and without touching them.

So maybe leave him a recording? That’s great, but be sure to use the right kind of recording equipment, like Milleniatta’s M-Disc DVDs which are supposed to last for ~10,000 years (no refunds).

But here’s an even more difficult problem: language evolves. We can barely understand the English in Shakespearian plays, which were written less than 500 years ago. Even if you were to write yourself into a book and leave it in a well-preserved time capsule for 10,000 years, it is likely that nobody will be able to read it when it opens. The same applies for any kind of recording.

So what can you do? Etch your portrait on a cave’s wall, like the cavemen did? That’s great, except that you’ll need to do it in thousands of caves, just for the chance that some drawings will survive. And what can multison learn about you from an etched portrait with no words? Basically, all that we know about the cavemen from their drawings is which animals they used to hunt. That’s not a very efficient form to transmit information through the ages.

Another possibility (and one that I’ve considered doing myself) is to genetically engineer a bacteria that contains information about you in its genetic code. Scientists have already shown they can write information in the DNA of a bacteria, turning it into a living hard drive. Some microorganisms should have room enough for thousands of bytes of data, and each time they replicate, each of the descendants will carry the message forward into the future. You have the evolving language issue here again, but at least you’ll get the text of message across to multison. He should really appreciate all the effort you’ve put into this, by the way.

But he probably won’t even know about it, because bacteria are not great copywriters. Every time your bacteria divides into two, some of its DNA will mutate. When critical genes mutate, the bacteria dies. But your text is not essential to the germ’s continued existence, and so it is most likely that in a few thousand years (probably closer to a decade), the bacteria will just shed off the extra-DNA load.

Have you despaired already? Well, don’t, because here is a chart that could inspire hope again. It’s from Steward Brand’s highly recommended book “The Clock of the Long Now”, and it shows the time frames in which changes occur.

Brand believes that each ‘layer’ changes and evolves at different paces. Fashion changes by the week, while changes in commerce and infrastructure take years to accomplish, and (unfortunately) so do changes in governance. Culture and nature, on the other hand, take thousands of years to change. We still know of the idea of Zeus, the Greek god, even though there are almost no Zeus-worshippers today. And we still rememebr the myths of the bible, even though their origins are thousands of years old.

So my suggestion for you? Start a new cultural trend, and make sure to imbue it with all the properties that will make it stay viable through the ages. You can create a religion, for example. It’s easier than it sounds. The Mormon religion was only created two hundred years ago, with amazingly delusional claims, which didn’t seem to bother anyone anyway. And now you have a little more than 15 million Mormons in the world. If they keep up this pace, they’ll be a major religion within a few hundred years, and their founder and prophet, Joseph Smith will live for a very long time in their collective memory.

So a religion is probably the best solution, since it’s a self-conserving mechanism for propagating knowledge down the ages. You can even include commandments to fight other religions (and so increase your religion’s resistance to being overtaken by other ideas), or command your worshippers to mention your name every day so that they never forget it. Or that they should respect their mothers and fathers, so that people will want to teach the religion to their children. Or that they shouldn’t kill anyone (except for blasphemers, of course) so that the number of worshippers doesn’t dwindle. Or that…